Why User Misbehavior Is a Blessing

Chris Chae
The Startup
Published in
6 min readNov 28, 2019

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User Misbehavior is a Blessing.

You worked hard to build a product. You get some customers to use your product, and you are just happy that people are using what you worked on for the last several months. But you soon find out they are using in a way you totally did not expect. What do you do when you find yourself in such a case? What do you do to make sure you are on the right path to product-market-fit?

“If your customers are using your product in ways you didn’t predict, this is potentially very valuable information.”

If you are an early-stage startup, you should be a Swiss Army knife. You don’t know which set of tools would work for your problem just yet. So create as many tools that work for your users as possible and try them out until you’ve gauged the right one. Limiting the use case for your product to only your intentions is like volunteering to stick with just one tool to test when you can have the whole set to try out.

It is Key to Nailing Product-Market Fit

Your path to finding product-market fit may not be so linear. In fact, many successful founders found their initial product-market fit from an unexpected place! To find out whether you have a product-market fit in an adjacent area to your starting point, you have to pay…

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Chris Chae
The Startup

Co-founder @ Hyperinbox (formerly Pixelic). We help product-centered teams to work better.